David Weekly’s Blog

Also known as: David’s Guide to Getting Drunk in Style.

With eight years of wine tasting experience, I’ve now become the sommelier (wine steward) for the house I live in, Rainbow Mansion (nothing to do with our sexual orientation; we’re at the end of Rainbow Drive). We drink a kind of startling quantity of alcohol, being eight strapping men and women in our 20’s and early 30’s who like bringing over friends and entertaining. It’s not unheard of for us to down half a case in a night and most evenings see one or two bottles dispensed with. So I’ve been tasked with keeping us supplied with quality, affordable liquors. So I make a point of trying a lot of different kinds of wines, beers, sakes, and liquors to bring the best home to the house. The great news is that the Good Stuff is often not startlingly expensive or even hard to find. It just needs a little researching. And that’s where I come in, so you don’t need to do that “hard work”.

BEER

Cheap Beer. Need to bring a six pack to a party and don’t want to be the chump bringing Bud Light? Good, cheap choices are Fat Tire, Widmer Hefeweizen, and Corona (with a lime in it of course — please bring the lime). They’re all good, widely available, and not very expensive. Heineken’s a little watery for my taste, but not a terrible pick. Sapporo goes well with Asian cuisine. And if you can get your hands on a six pack of Sam Adams’ Cherry Wheat, you’ll be a hit with the ladies. Please, please don’t show up with MGD, PBR, or Natural Light, even if it’s to be ironic.

Quality Beer. Boddington’s and Guinness are absolutely rock solid staples for quality beer. Incredibly drinkable and smooth nitrogenated beers, they have reached the same kind of unimpeachable staple perfection as Heinz hit in ketchup and French’s in mustard, Sriracha’s in Asian spicy sauce, and Tapatio in Mexican hot sauce. But I digress. Just make sure to buy the tall cans of these beers and serve them cold - pour them immediately after opening into tall, refrigerated pint glasses. Smithwick’s gets an honorable mention here, and Kilkenny Irish Cream Ale is the best of the bunch but VERY sadly not available for sale in the US. (I got hooked on the stuff in New Zealand and miss it terribly.)

Corked Beer. Everyone (including myself) is a sucker for Belgian ales with a champagne top. It just feels classy to decork your beer. Chimay Blue has you covere here. ~$10 for a wine-sized (750mL) bottle. Very tasty. This beer, like other Belgian ales, is actually ideally served in wine-like glasses to be sipped, not pounded. (There’s a time and a place for the red Dixie cups; this ain’t it.) Allagash’s Curieux is another Belgian-style ale, this one aged in Bourbon barrels; quite tasty and sophisticated.

SAKE

Now most Americans haven’t had a lot of experience with sake. What experience they have had has been bad. My first take on sake was during college, watching anime with some friends, and we thought it would be really “authentic” to grab some sake to go with the anime. So we bought the cheapest stuff we could at the local liquor mart. We heard that traditionally sake is served warm, so we stuffed it in the microwave and served what came out. Good lord it was terrible, like getting assaulted by dirty gym socks. I decided that was it for me and sake.

Fast forward about three years from that to a trip I took to New York and some friends of mine wanted to drag me out to a sake bar. My protests were quickly waylaid as it became clear that noodles would also be served as I had missed dinner altogether. They bought a nice bottle (served cold) and gave me a sip - it was delicious! I was “reintroduced” to the world of sake.

Now if you happen to live in the San Francisco Bay Area, I would very highly recommend you take a day trip out to Takara Sake Factory in Berkeley. They provide free sake tastings (with an adorable museum) every day. And you can get some very, very good sake there very cheap. I’d particularly recommend the Shirakabe Gura Tokubetsu Junmai ($16/bottle), which serves amazingly well at room temperature and will absolutely convert new people to sake. The Sho Chiku Bai Organic Nama is refreshing and tasty (and a ridiculously cheap $7/mini-bottle), but the Sho Chiku Bai Nigori Crème de Sake is really what will win you friends. At $43 per CASE (12 small bottles), this stuff is one of the best deals for any kind of quality alcohol anywhere. And yes, trust me, you want a case of the Creme de Sake.

WINE

It seems that America over the last few years has begun to overcome its fear of wine. I’m very happy for this. The wine world can seem scary, with its pretentious personalities, complicated lingo, innumerable varietals and geographies, and marketing hocus pocus. But all of this serves to obscure the simple fact that alcoholic grape juice can be pretty damned tasty.

And tasty is really what it should be all about. NEVER feel pressured into buying a wine because it’s fancy or because you’re supposed to like it. The whole point is that you should like it. If you do learn words to describe the wines you drink, it should be for the primary purpose of finding other wines you like to drink, not to be pompous. So start with whatever comes to you, like “this reminds me of bubble gum.” Or “this smells like Grandma.” It’s fine. And if you find out you like a very unsophisticated or discount supermarket wine? Well, f— the haters. Know what you like.

WHITE WINE

The best white table wine in America is probably Carnival by Peju, a French Colombard that retails for about $16 a bottle; very lightly sweet and incredibly drinkable. Mondavi’s Fume Blanc is a little drier and is also a very solid and palatable white for even discerning palates at $15 a bottle. Navarro makes some of the best “off dry” (read: “lightly sweet”) whites out there, including their delectable late-harvest Riesling and, unbelievably, a Gewurtztraminer GRAPE JUICE that is out of this world - perfect for your Mormon friends. (Ditto their Pinot Noir juice.) Thankfully, I don’t like Sauternes at all, so won’t comment on them. The best port wines are the Vi Sattui 1999 Vintage Port ($34) and the 2006 Brutocao Ruby Port ($34)

CHAMPAGNE

Roederer’s Estate Anderson Valley Extra Dry (only available at the winery) is about $21 a bottle and is pretty much the only champagne I actually like. Yes, I’ve tried Dom Perignon and all sorts of other fancies, but most fizzies don’t sit well with me. Mind you, I won’t pass up a mimosa or a bellini.

RED WINES

In most other civilized countries in the world, red wine is as commonplace as water (and maybe consumed more often).  My favorites are Chilean Malbecs from Mendoza and Californian Pinot Noirs and Zinfandels. Specifically the the 2006 Duckhorn Migration Pinot Noir ($32/bottle), Imagery Zinfandel ($45/bottle), Benziger Tribute ($80), and Opus One ($150). The only wine club I belong to is Benziger and their sister wine Imagery is fantastic as well. The most FUN red wines probably come from a crazy old Dutch grandfather’s shack - visit Van Der Hayden Vineyards and you’ll probably be greeted by several children running screaming around the yard. It’s awesome.

MEAD

Honey wine (also called “tej” if you’ve ever had it with Ethiopian food) is quite good and can surprisingly vary across the board from very dry to (less surprisingly) very sweet. There’s a lovely meadery in South Bay called Rabbit’s Foot Meadery, definitely worth a visit.

TERRIBLE UI @ Hotel Gotico: Elevator

Originally uploaded by dweekly

This could quite possibly be the worst designed elevator interface in the world.

Perill de Caigudes? Or Breakdancing?

Originally uploaded by dweekly

Photo from Barcelona - caution, you might be compelled to breakdance!

This weekend I banged out a very simple location service called L0K8. It consists of a small (1.1MB) Windows download. You install & run, it pops up a web page, you give it your twitter username & password, and now as you move from place to place your Twitter location will change to follow you. And of course you can follow L0K8 on twitter to stay up to date with developments.

It was really fun and refreshing to go soup-to-nuts in 12 hours, something that I’ve done before with PBwiki, SingleStat.us, QuickFinger, and FailStamp, but this is my first “single session hack” that involved both a desktop client and a web service. I used ActiveState’s PerlTray to make a simple Perl script into a system tray executable then installed with NSIS. I can provide source if people are interested. The server backend is in PHP and uses libcurl to post Twitter updates and GeoIP to do the location lookups.

The desktop app sits resident and every five minutes pulls the update URL (http://l0k8.com/update.php) to fetch a JSON array of simple info about the user’s current location. If the location has changed since the last update, the app then presents the new location to the user and the server posts the update to Twitter if the user has associated their L0K8 account with a Twitter username and password. Multiple installations can be used by the same account and each install is labeled (e.g. with the name of the computer).

This was designed to be the simplest possible incarnation of the server that could work and I think it is a very exciting baseline that could be built out substantially as a simple presence redistribution point. I’m tempted to explore ways to virally engage people with L0K8. If you have feedback, let me know!

Who am I?

Who do I want to be?

I want to create, explore, dream

to add to the human experience

to love and inspire

and to give hope.

I want to experience the human condition

and have friends from all walks, in all places.

I want to feel pain, sorrow, loss, delight,

eat the finest and coarsest cuisines

I want to struggle and fail

to love unrequited

without becoming bitter.

I want to see God in every face.

When I was stuck in Boston’s Logan International Airport for a few hours waiting for a flight, I decided I ought to get some work done; I popped open my laptop to see if I could spot a free network. Signed onto “loganwifi” and got a page full of ads asking me to pay for access via Boingo Wireless. At $10/mo ($22/mo after the first 3) and 100,000 access points, I decided I might give it a whirl and plopped down my card. Things were smooth, but then it wanted me to download a Windows program. Ruh-roh. (I’m just connecting to wifi! Why do I need another resident program?) So I go ahead and install it and run it. It thinks for two minutes about logging in and then gives me a “999 Network Error” and a phone number for support. Here’s where things get good.

I connected with support relatively quickly, and the guy sounded educated and confident in his answers, but I was shocked at the things he said:

“Are you recharging right now? Yes? Then I’d recommend you unplug and move a few feet away. I know the signal strength says 77%, but that really doesn’t mean much. Most people I talk with who are having connection issues are recharging, you know.”

“Did you download the program with Firefox? Firefox sometimes has an issue with these wireless networks and the installed program might be corrupted, which could be causing the ‘999 Network Error’. Try downloading the program again with IE.”

“Okay, just go to Boingo and log in again…” (I log in and the website refreshes for several minutes saying “Now Loading Account Information” and then gave up.)

“Oh, you’re using a Core 2 processor with Boingo? You know, that just doesn’t work, the signal bounces back and forth between the two processors and so some locations you just can’t connect.”

I started yelling at him and eventually got a refund. [smacks head]

It was amazing how confident this guy was. I probably wouldn’t have known how nuts this guy was if I wasnt’ a computer scientist myself.

written during an april 2008 trip to boston

Although my training is principally that of a computer scientist, I have a deep appreciation for architecture. The glory of computing is that in a short period of time and with only a limited set of resources, one can impact a very large number of people. The computer in this sense is an Idea Amplifier, a megaphone of sorts. But architecture is exciting in the opposite “time-people” slice, where a building has the opportunity to impact a large number of people over a large amount of time. While at any given point in time its impact is limited due to the size of the building (which cannot fit one million people) and the fact that it is located in a specific geographic location (and thus out of reach of people who don’t happen to be there), the building remains in a way that software does not, standing for sometimes hundreds of years. So I suspect that at some point in my life I may become quite fixated on creating buildings.

My friend Eric Silverberg and I yesterday walked through the Boston Public Library and its architecturally famous reading room. After a brief discussion on patent law inspired by browsing the year-over-year rapidly expanding volumes of the patent office (and remarking on the fact that the Patent Office in the 1800’s kept incredibly detailed records on all sorts of metrics of agricultural production and trade), we walked to the new wing of the library, built in the 1960’s. The change was visceral - the design went from open and magnificent to cluttered and claustrophobic. Eric and I paused to discuss the differences.

“Eric,” I said, looking around the new reading area, “I don’t get it - this space has all the right ingredients. Tall ceilings, smooth lines, marble and matte black. I can understand why someone would have given a thumbs up to this design. What’s not working?”

Eric pointed out that the light was not sunlight and was not sufficiently bright, but also that the stacks didn’t work visually - “it’s like they forgot that there were going to be books on the shelves!” That was a helpful epiphany; an unbacked bookshelf is going to look scattered. When designing a room consider its appearance and character when filled.

We walked to the atrium of the new wing, and could see the parallels to the classic wing: light coming form a skylight some six stories above, smooth marble paneling, and staircases going up the side. Again, all of the right ingredients for a marvelous welcome to the library. But it felt like an industrial test chamber, not a grand entrance like the old wing. I noted three key differences: the stairs were angular instead of swept in a curve (hence the industrial feel), the marble was matte instead of polished (lower cost, but less elegant, also reducing the light reflected from the skylight), and there was no artistic detailing on any features. No engraved writing or crests or anything, just a giant American flag hanging five stories up. The eye had nothing to settle on and
appreciate.

Other themes I’ve noticed from architecture: homes should have a larger number of smaller rooms. Who the hell needs a cavernous 2000 square foot “master retreat” for a bedroom? That’s just creepy and lonely. Use the extra floor space for guest bedrooms and common space. People don’t need giant bedrooms to be happy; just something that’s big enough for a comfortable bed, a small closet, and a desk. A bigger room than that doesn’t make people happier, but being able to host friends will. Bathrooms should also be small and purposeful. 95% of the time they are utility; they don’t need to be apartments unto themselves. Architects should focus more on a home for entertaining and being hospitable.

Instead of having a “McMansion” you could for the same price and with the same space build out a home with eight small bedrooms, three showers, five toilets, a great kitchen, and plenty of common space for events. And presto! you’ve set yourself up for a much more interesting and fulfilling life.

With only about 50% of PBwiki’s traffic coming from North America and with preliminary benchmarks showing 3+ second page load times in Paris, I’ve been thinking a bit about how to make the PBwiki experience snappy for people around the world. We’ve experimented with using various CDNs, but I’ve actually yet to be blown away by any of them. Having our own nodes at the edge can provide a number of benefits, such as having a well-defined cache invalidation strategy, performing DNS closer to the edges of users’ networks, caching secure data, and performing SSL handshakes quickly for logins.

So a reasonable question to ask at this point is - where are the spots where we’d get the most bang for the buck adding a new server? Answering this question requires a basic understanding of Internet topology. Armed with VPS accounts in Singapore and The Netherlands and traceroute.org, I set out to get a basic feel for the current state of global networks.

My principal hoped-for finding turned out to be true - links are mostly additive. Meaning that if it takes 200ms to get from Singapore to California and 85ms to get from California to Virginia, it takes nearly 285ms to get from Singapore to Virginia. Generally the direct route times were about 10% faster than the sums of the links, but never a lot less than that. This was encouraging because it said that latency was fairly consistently due to the speed of light.

That said, there were some startling findings as to global connectivity - The Netherlands are about 4500 miles away from India, but packets from Amsterdam consistently routed through Palo Alto on a 16,000+ mile journey the wrong way around the planet.

I also found that most of South America seems to route through Miami - even traffic within South America! And that traffic for South Africa often routes through New York, even from London, crossing the Atlantic twice. SAT-3 doesn’t seem to be doing its job.

David’s Tips on International Expansion Ordering:

1. 1st cluster: To be most Net-accessible, your first cluster should probably be hosted in the US on either the West or East coast, depending on target demographic.
2. 2nd cluster: Your second cluster should probably be on the other US coast - this will mean you’re within ~40ms of nearly all of North America, are under 100ms from Europe, and are under 200ms from Asia & Oceania.
3. 3rd, 4th, 5th, and 6th clusters: Once you get into the swing of having a few clusters, the remaining spots that make sense seem to be Europe (Amsterdam & London are eminently reasonable choices), Australia or New Zealand, Japan, and Singapore or Hong Kong. It looks like the European ISPs have been peering reasonably well and are all under 50ms from London or Amsterdam. AU and NZ are ~30ms apart (Sydney from Auckland), as are Singapore and Hong Kong.
4. Extra clusters: As needed, you can deploy in Brazil (which won’t help other South American traffic), South Africa (which won’t help other African traffic), India, or Israel (for Middle East acceleration).

More later on how to expand into additional points of presence at a low cost.

A post of mine from a recent email thread on why a co-op should continue to host a server with arguably distasteful but legal content:

“I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

Those who believe in the power of free speech do not believe in the excellence of each speech, but in the excellence of the collective understanding that results. Each one of us has truths and falsities and we must together thresh the false ideas from the wise. Even wise men can be foolish and even fools may be privy to wisdom. So we must consider each speech on its own merits and not mute anyone or raise some other up on a special pedestal of infallibility. This perspective compels us to permit the submission of all ideas to the judgment of mankind. And if we are all separably and collectively wise in these things, devising best we can lies from knowledge, we shall thrive as a species, acting on all the best data available to us.

In this capacity have our servers been home to churches, governments, anarchists, junior republicans, UFO conspiracy theorists, strip clubs, libraries, political candidates, sex parties, kindergarden teachers, reading groups, carpentry shops, and multinational corporations. We welcome all(*).

- David

(*) Needless to say, the in-person user meetings could get awkward.

In honor of pi day (3/14)…

If pi has an infinite number of digits in random sequence, then pi must contain all sequences.

It is commonly said that “pi does not repeat” and while generally true (pi does not predictably repeat) I think this assertion is clearly not strictly correct - there are an infinite number of repeated sequences in pi (e.g. “123123″ occurs in the first million digits) as subsets of the sets of numbers in pi.

Therefore, I postulate that there exists at least one decimal position N in pi that is followed by the exact sequence of digits 1 to N-1. Namely, pi is “3.14159…314159..”. In regular expression syntax this question would actually just be phrased as /^([0-9]+){2}/, omitting the period after 3, naturally.

It should be provable that not only such an N exists but there is an infinite set of such repeating points. I would guess that that first N would be very large, maybe larger than the number of digits of pi yet computed (in the trillions), but if there is one there are almost assuredly an infinite number of other repeating points. This set would start with an almost improbably large number and I would suppose the numbers would very quickly get ridiculously larger.

There would be different such sets for different transcendentals, so perhaps we can discuss the creation of a function “D” that defines the infinite set of these “repeating points” for any transcendental. D(π) , D(e), D(φ), D(√2), etc.

The singularity is past. We’re already living in a collective consciousness with behaviors exceeding the capacity of any human or machine to understand, because that collective has intelligence exceeding our own by definition.

Death makes life valuable. In having a fixed lifetime, every moment living becomes precious, because every decision must be the absolute best. There’s no time to screw around with a short life. This is a good thing, so I embrace my mortality.

What you get done is more important than what you do. Leverage the work of others and become someone who causes useful things to get done. At the end of the day, nobody really cares how much work you put into something yourself. Results are it.  (This is the theme of the Four Hour Workweek and of most texts on executive management.)

People want to belong to a system. Systems can be designed and programmed.

Education gives the best returns. Few things can improve GDP as having a well-educated populace. Compare wealth generation for immigrant cultures with a strong educational focus to those that do not for a clear demonstration.

Humans think in stories. Everything is a story, from business to love to travel. Learn to tell a good story and listen to others’ stories.

The devil is in the determinism. You can and do affect the future and the fate of the world. You are writing your own destiny; make it a good one.

Consistency is more important than correctness. People can deal with predictable systems even if they are flawed - bugs have workarounds when understood. But non-deterministic issues, even if minor, will drive people batshit crazy. Separately, this is why people like drinking Coke and eating McDonald’s even if they know it is terrible - they appreciate the consistency.

Who am I?
Who do I want to be?

I want to create, explore, dream
to add to the human experience
to love and inspire
and to give hope.

I want to experience the human condition
and have friends from all walks, in all places.

I want to feel pain, sorrow, loss, delight,
eat the finest and coarsest cuisines

I want to struggle and fail
to love unrequited
without becoming bitter.

I want to see God in every face.

On September 22nd, 2007, I got together with several of my friends (Eve Phillips, Jocelyn Joy Berl, Travis Kalanick, Nathan Schmidt, and Alan Keefer) and with the inspiration of my brother Chris Weekly we tasted a number of beers and rated them, along with commentary. They’re ranked here from top scoring to bottom scoring as averaged by all six individual scores. All scores are on a scale of 10.

Boddington’s (7.6)
- smooth, creamy, balanced
- i love it, wow
- it’s got “twang”
- clean finish, doesn’t linger
- quickly drinkable, goes down fast
- classically styled

Smithwick’s (7.1)
- very full-bodied, smooth beer
- mature, nothing up front, everything on the back end
- the trojan horse of beers
- almost “woodsy” not quite “floury”

Hen’s Tooth (6.6)
- malty musky
- bitter, sour, strong, “leather and coffee”
- could drink some amount of it

St. Peter’s Golden Ale (6.5)
- hoppy head, barley ass
- a little honeyed
- burnt toast, lingering
- a long finish
- citrusy like a bitter orange

St. Peter’s English Ale (6.0)
- hoppy, tart, smooth/subtle
- bready, easy to drink

Murphy’s Irish Red [in glass] (5.8)
- lacking in personality
- “the guy with pec implants”
- not at all what i would expect from an “irish red”,
this is an “irish pink”
- “almost great…but it misses”
- got a little “snap” to it
- sourdoughy, herby, tart, “sunny like a picnic”
- good picnic beer, cheerful / inoffensive
- “let’s play some volleyball”

Hobgoblin [wychwood brewery] (5.0)
- fruity, citrusy, “early bitterball”, a “clean exit”
- “this is almost a fruit juice”
- heavy, but doesn’t stick around
- wouldn’t want to drink a lot of it, “4 oz and i’m done”

Killian’s (5.0)
- transition beer from “not beer to beer”
- musty, “horsey”, “hay, urine, and dust”
- sparkly, not a lot of taste, bland
- “would not call in the morning”
- “meh”
- olivey
- a “bar beer”, “not a gourmet beer”
- velvety, soft, a little fruity / apple juice

Miller Lite (3.8)
- “club soda redone as beer”
- “it’s really nothing”
- inoffensive, simple
- watery
- “an inch and a half of roots showing”
- “trailer trash beer”

Belhaven “Wee Heavy” (3.4)
- nice color
- “something is wrong with this beer”
- eve WINCED - bitter & chocolatey “like a triple boch”
- rancid chocolate
- “it smells of feet…and not my feet”
- “over the top on every category”
- “italian chimay”
- strong attitude
- sweet, bitter, sour vanilla with chocolate
- “bridge and tunnel”

Help. My identity has been spread too thin.

While I’ve been surfing the Internet since before the web (archie, gopher, and ytalk were my friends in 1990) it wasn’t until 1996 that I created my first website at http://www.stanford.edu/~dewpoint/ (gone now) in anticipation of becoming a freshman at Stanford. On campus, I soon moved to hosting it on my own server in my dorm room, so “my URL” became http://barista.stanford.edu/ - that was my home for another year most notably featuring the first layman’s level description of MP3 and the MP3 Audio Consortium, home to a set of early-days MP3 webmasters who were intent on spreading the word about the power of MP3 to transform artist-listener relations. (We weren’t wrong.)

It wasn’t until 1998 that I realized I was going to need a permanent, personal URL to identify me and I set up David.Weekly.org. (A squatter has been sitting on Weekly.com for the last decade and refuses to sell the domain to me - also, David Weekley Homes owns DavidWeekly.com. Boo!) For the next seven years, I posted pretty regularly, adding poetry, pictures, links, posts, wine reviews, books I was planning on reading, a half-completed book on MP3 I wrote, and the first independent acoustic analysis of the Windows Media Audio format. I wrote my own scripts to handle the comments, the photo gallery, the books and wine applications, and the templating and navigation.

But then something kind of funny happened; around 2005 or so I found myself starting to contribute content to other sites than d.w.o. It felt good to add a photo to flickr and be participating in a conversation about pictures there, to be part of a shared dialogue instead of a monologue. I started adding profiles in different places, first Friendster, then Ryze, Tribe, MySpace, Orkut, OkCupid, LinkedIn, Facebook, TheFunded, ASmallWorld…my status updates went on AIM, into Facebook, and in my GMail — my identity has been getting spread thin. I stopped blogging, because who was going to see it if I just wrote it on d.w.o?

But in a certain sense, this was inevitable and a result of me eating my own philosophical dogfood. If I’m not the best picture gallery coder or host in the world, shouldn’t I let someone else do it? I even stopped hosting my own email in 2004 (I now use Gmail, which filters over 31,000 spam messages a month for me).

I’m now determined to attempt to see if I can cure my digital schizophrenia by
tying together these different communities and resources via a singular location. This is going to take a little fancy technology to bring in information from all these sources to reside in one place, but it should also encourage me to get back to writing (on a WordPress blog, naturally) again.

So here’s step one of gluing everything back together again.